Editor’s note: Rafael Marañón-Abreu and Azamat Abdymomunov founded the
MIT Social Media Club in September 2010. As of this writing, the club has 70
active members, including MIT students, faculty, and staff.
MIT’s System Design and
Management Program (SDM) has not only provided the advantages that we expected
from a world-class program in engineering and management—it has also given us
the opportunity to learn about emerging technologies that can help people,
corporations, and government work more effectively. Within this realm, social
media stood out for us as an area worth further exploration.
 |
| Two members of SDM’s 2010 cohort, Rafael Marañón-Abreu, left, and Azamat Abdymomunov, teamed up to start the MIT Social Media Club. |
We cofounded the MIT Social
Media Club to build connections with others at SDM and across the Institute and
work collectively to understand the newest channels of communication—from
communities such as Facebook and LinkedIn to blogs, Twitter feeds, and YouTube.
As mid-career professionals returning to university, we believed that it was
important to investigate social media and understand how to put them to work
for individuals and organizations. We were surprised to learn that there was no
social media club at MIT, so we decided to start one. We believed this could
help us maximize our education and share past and present thoughts and
experiences, while visualizing and creating our individual futures and
simultaneously giving back to SDM and the MIT communities.
Founding the MIT Social Media
Club was hard work, but applying many of the concepts we learned in our SDM
courses helped us to execute this exciting startup. For example, our lessons
from classes in system architecture, systems thinking, technology strategy, and
project management helped us to look at how social media functions in the
contemporary environment.
We discovered that social media
is not only useful for job hunting, but can help us better understand the dynamics
among talented people in an organization, as well as how learning teams are
constituted and flourish. We believe it can offer a competitive advantage in
global business, help governments reinvent themselves, and help academics
expand and evolve their capacity for teaching and research.
In the MIT Social Media Club,
we encourage our members—including PhD, master’s, and Sloan students, as well
as others at MIT—to understand and get hands-on experience using social media
tools and to explore how they can be used to close the gap between an
organization’s senior leaders, front-line employees, partner companies,
customers, and other stakeholders. In the same way, social media can be used to
build bridges between faculty members and students, and among researchers from
different universities and countries.
Already we have come up with a
couple of frameworks that we used in teaching an Independent Activities Period
course this past January, ESD.942 Social Media: Trust, Information Seeking
& Systems Innovation in the Digital Age. This class was sponsored by Dr.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, who led the first
multi-disciplinary research program created to understand the behavior of the
45+ population, including how the older population makes decisions using social
media.
Although still very new, the
MIT Social Media Club has held several successful events, including workshops
on how to increase your digital footprint and how to use social media in a job
search. This spring we’re planning a series of social media research tours,
which will allow club members to visit different departments and labs at MIT
and elsewhere to explore how social media are being used in the workplace.
We would like to extend an
invitation to SDM industry partners to get involved. For more information,
visit the MIT Social Media Club online at socialmedia.mit.edu.
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